Oswego School Board candidates discuss recruiting, retaining bilingual educators at forum

How to recruit and retain bilingual educators was one of the issues discussed during a recent Oswego Dist. 308 School Board candidate forum.

The forum was hosted by Oswego School District 308’s Bilingual Parent Advisory Committee. BPAC is comprised of bilingual parents with English Learner students.

More than 60 languages are spoken in the district.

Eight candidates are running for four seats open on the board. They include Oswego Library Board trustee James Marter of Oswego, who also is running for reelection to the Oswego Library Board.

Other candidates include Katie Heiden, of Oswego; Rovel Pollock, of Oswego; Erika Sieh, of Aurora; Dawn Marquis, of Oswego; Kari Foulk, of Oswego; Brandi Robinson, of Aurora, and Heather Martin, of Montgomery.

Marquis and Foulk did not attend the forum. Oswego District 308 covers about 68 square miles, taking in parts of Oswego, Aurora, Joliet, Montgomery, Plainfield and Yorkville.

In answering the question, Martin said the first thing she would do is establish strong partnerships and collaborations with local institutions that provide education and training.

She noted Aurora University is a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution and offers undergraduate and graduate programs in ESL/Bilingual endorsements, which are for Illinois educators who want to specialize in teaching multilingual students

Martin also said she would “incentivize folks we already have here to go get trained appropriately so that they can come back and serve in a different capacity.”

Sieh said she would like to work with the district’s labor unions “to talk about increasing wages, increasing benefit packages and improving working conditions to make us more attractive to any applications that we do get.”

She also would like to see the district do more professional development.

“I know that we have something like 60 plus languages spoken in the district, so anything we can do that makes our teachers more aware of that and to address those issues that may come up with our students would be good,” Sieh said. “And I’d also like to see us reviewing curriculum on a regular basis to make sure we are providing the best curriculum for not only our multi-lingual students, but also our English speaking students.”

Marter said the district needs to recruit those educators who are the top performers and have the right skills.

“You are looking for the people who can meet the need in our schools and God willing, come here and hopefully be here for a long time,” he said. “And with this day and age of the Internet, if we aren’t recruiting off LinkedIn, we should be, or some of the other sites out there,” he said. “So there’s a lot of technology aspects to hiring and looking for resources. Our focus should be people who live around here, but every once in a while, who knows, we might find somebody who lives a little further out that might be willing to come here.”

Pollock noted the district unfortunately is competing with other districts when it comes to hiring.

“Ultimately, you have to consider what the surrounding districts are doing in terms of incentivizing to fill positions such as bilingual educators and perhaps adopting some of their incentives just to make us competitive,” Pollock said. “I think the other end of it is if you are waiting until you get to a job fair to recruit our bilingual educators, you’re already behind. Because that should start at the college level.”

Robinson said the district must first have honest conversations about “how can we move our dual language program into the forefront” in the community.

“We do have some great resources, but it goes back to the visibility of our program,” she said.

She also said providing additional compensation should be talked about in order to retain staff.

“A dual language program offers a lot for our kids, but it also takes a lot for the educators and our staff to make sure our kids are learning,” Robinson said.

Heiden brought up the idea of paid internships as a way to recruit.

“You earn while you learn,” she said. “It’s a lot to ask our interns in this day and age to do the work they are required to do for bilingual and special education programs for free…That’s really going to help with retention.”

Job shadowing should also be considered, Heiden said.

During the forum, a committee member read a statement from Faulk stating that having internships with local universities and partnering with multilingual groups would be a couple of ways to recruit educators.

The candidate forum can be watched at BPAC’s Facebook page.